Showing posts in Best Practices
"Most foster agreements spend three pages on feeding and leash rules and one sentence on who owns the animal. That is the wrong ratio. Here is a ten-clause agreement you can copy, and the argument for why the care rules should be taken out of it entirely."
DogsThe IRS sample conflict of interest policy defines the problem as a financial one, so the copy in your binder does nothing about the conflicts that damage rescues — who gets first refusal on the adoptable dog, whose friend gets the fee waived, which household the good foster animals go to. A nine-article policy that covers those, plus the argument that a bylaw banning insider payment governs it worse than permitting it under conditions.
GeneralRefusing to name a euthanasia threshold is not a policy against euthanasia — it is a decision to decide later, under pressure, by whoever is in the room. Three separate questions hide inside the word, and the third one, opportunity cost, is the one most rescues will not admit is a question at all.
MedicalCosted at replacement value, volunteer labour is about two-thirds of what a trapping night costs and the clinic donation is about a quarter. A group that is already turning down surgery slots because nobody can trap should spend its next marginal dollar paying a trapper, not buying more vouchers.
DogsPublished return rates for adopted dogs and cats run from 7% to 20%, but the figure your organization reports depends mostly on where you draw the cut-off. The published studies disagree about when returns happen, and that disagreement is the useful part.
MedicalThe 80% number is real, but it is a rate you have to keep paying, not a milestone you reach and bank. Most scattered, colony-by-colony TNR is a welfare intervention being sold as a population intervention, and the vacuum effect argument rescues use against catch-and-kill applies just as squarely to their own successes.
Colony & TNRDaily feeding is the closest thing you have to daily surveillance of your colony. If you're not recording it, you're throwing away the most useful data you'll ever collect.
GeneralYou said yes to fostering. Now you've got cats on different medications, a kitten litter that needs weighing, and information scattered across five places. Here's how to stay on top of it.
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